First Official Week of Junior Year

Woo! The first week of classes has ended....pretty crazy one, as I'm sure my fellow 3rd years can agree with. Anyways, here are my first impressions of my schedule this year:

Advanced Computer Animation: Pretty open class. The teacher is encouraging us to do actual short films instead of your usual collection of animation exercises(bouncing ball, walk cycles, etc.). Short being only a couple of seconds(I personally never plan on going over 30 seconds). I'm looking forward to what I'll be accomplishing in this class---first though, I need some ideas! I've been in such a creative rut this week....very frustrating!

Advanced Story Development: The teacher is so great. Lots of energy and is bringing a different take on story compared to my previous story classes. The first night we spent boarding out ideas inspired by a variety of music he played on his computer, then we pinned the drawings up in the room and we each pitched out boards. Laughs. Galore. The future classes also seem like they'll be really helpful with getting me to think more "creatively" about story ideas. One class that's coming up is based around Bumper Sticker slogans, while another is all about coming up with as many cliches as you can think of and putting a new spin on them. Awe-some!

Advanced Life Drawing: My teacher Corny Cole literally walked into the room, turned to all 35 of us and told us the phrase he's very well-known for, "DRAW, GODDAMMIT!" He then elaborated, "We're doing gestures today---10 seconds, 5 minutes, whatever....now go!" And away we went---my gestures were absolutely grotesque and I felt very rusty on the 30 second or less gestures, but it felt great getting back into it all. Plus Corny's commentary during class was highly entertaining. Sadly, can't remember too much of what he said, but this Tuesday I'll try and remember some gems of his. haha

Advanced Traditional Animation: I'm not going to elaborate on this one. So, I guess, T.B.A?

Post Production: Simply put, so fully awesome. The teacher Chris Sonnenberg will be doing a lot of one-on-one and will be teaching us based on our individual needs for finishing our films this year. Right now we'll be working on every aspect of making a film---boarding, designing, color keys, making work-books, animatics, recording sound, etc. He wants us to experience every last step in the giant work pipe-line of producing an animated film. He'll also be going frame-by-frame on two of the projects he helped on(to show us how he approaches the "pipe-line" himself): Enchanted's opening 2D section of the film and the opening of Kung Fu Panda. Definitely looking forward to his class, but at the same time--I need to get crackin' on a film idea. Lots of loose ideas, but nothing whatsoever that's solid, interesting, and something I want to work on all year.

Directing for Animators: Another quite frankly, awesome class/teacher. The teacher is a huge library of knowledge, his background covers areas like directing independent films in Bulgeria to shows like the old Johnny Bravo/Dexter's Lab/Cow and Chicken era. I can definitely see why my classmates highly recommend this class and I'm really happy to taking it. He's assigning us mainly storyboarding homework and already the first in-class project has me hitting the ground running. I'm looking forward to his critique next Friday.

So those are my classes this year. Inbetween all that, I'm one of the department's Teacher Assistants this year and on Wednesday or Thursdays, depending on various circumstances, I'm out and drawing at the zoo. Should be a very interesting first semester...so now, off to rack my brain some more about this elusive third year film idea. Hmmm....

P.S. Here's the Kung Fu Panda segment in its HD glory.
3 months--about 6 people working on it.